Pentagon Sends An Engineer & A Navy SEAL To Run Silicon Valley Office

Less than 5 months after Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that the military would be opening up the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental aka DIUx in Silicon Valley, the Pentagon’s men have already arrived.

George Duchak, will serve as DIUx’s director. He’s worked at the Air Force Research Laboratory, DARPA and in the private sector. His counter part will be Rear Adm. Brian Hendrickson, a Naval Academy graduate with an MBA from Harvard. He’s also a Navy SEAL and served in the U.S. Special Operations Command.

These two impressive men will be entrusted with wooing the tech savvy minds of Silicon Valley to work and partner with the military. They will work out of building next to an airfield that Google leases from the military. Both men have entrepreneurial backgrounds that are essential to making many in the area comfortable working with them.

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work had this to say.

“We’ll learn a lot about what technologies are emerging in the high-tech world and they’re going to learn a lot about what we need…We need to prove to the Valley that we aren’t this big ponderous beast — that we can turn some things certainly a little faster if they are very promising, have good technology behind them and we see a way to get there.”

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From Defense One:

MOUNTAINVIEW, Calif. – Less than five months since Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that the Pentagon would open a Silicon Valley office, an engineer and a NavySEAL are already working to persuade the government-weary tech community to partner with the military.

Their new office, dubbed the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental — DIUx for short — occupies a building near Moffett Federal Airfield’s massive WWII-era airship hangars. By Pentagon standards, it has materialized at light speed. Still, “The secretary would say that we’re too slow,” Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said aboard a westward flight to the new office.

Work and Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall met late Tuesday with the men in charge of the new office. George Duchak, the DIUx director, has worked at the Air Force Research Laboratory,DARPA, and in the private sector, Work said. His military deputy, Rear Adm. Brian Hendrickson, is a Naval Academy graduate with an MBA from Harvard and experience with SEAL teams and U.S. Special Operations Command.